The last time I was back in Britain and stuck in the bowels of the Central Line on a Tube train limping painfully towards Oxford Circus, I found myself observing a group of teenage girls in prohibitively short skirts. “Look at him,” shrilled the loudest, prettiest member of the pack, pointing out a silver-haired gent peering over the top of his Metro. “He keeps staring at my legs.” The man turned a violent shade of puce and raised his newspaper still higher, in an attempt to block out all the body parts he shouldn’t be looking at.

I felt for him. The girl had very nice legs. The girl knew she had very nice legs, and had chosen to showcase them in a belt of fabric that would draw admiring glances from every male member of that carriage – and a few females besides. Yet she found it demeaning – or “disgusting”, to quote her friend’s empathetic murmur – to be reduced to an object of beauty. Women, she believed, in her indignant, third-wave feminist little head, are more than the sum total of their gloriously appealing body parts. So she happened to be beautiful. So what?

So what, indeed. But women seem to have got themselves into a tangle over beauty. If the media is any reflection (and it is), anyone would think that the majority of women now spend an inordinate percentage of their time worrying about their looks – and the rest of it actively trying to enhance them. Historians will tell you that this has always been the case, only modern women have tools at their disposal that even the corseted and bewigged Madame de Pompadour would have blanched at.

We can dye our skins, suck the fat from our bottoms and thighs, stretch and plump out our faces. We can subject our bodies to intensive fitness regimes, embark on scientifically tested diets and then flaunt parts of ourselves that have for centuries remained hidden in a provocative array of new fabrics and styles. But should any man (or woman) notice or – God forbid – point out the results of our efforts, we immediately rise up in revolt.

Take Laura Fernee, a 33-year-old science graduate from Notting Hill who poutingly decried her own beauty in yesterday’s papers as the reason she was unable to hold down a job. “I’m not lazy and I’m no bimbo,” she mourned. “The truth is my good looks have caused massive problems for me when it comes to employment.” Female colleagues were jealous and male colleagues “were only interested in me for how I looked. I wanted them to recognise my achievements and my professionalism, but all they saw was my face and body.”

Fernee is not alone in her self-made beauty inferno. Just the other day, a scrupulously turned-out, highly attractive friend remarked that a casual comment her boss had made about her dress had left her feeling “patronised”. Last month, President Obama was forced to publicly apologise for calling the California attorney general “good-looking”. Never mind that he had formerly praised Kamala Harris for being “brilliant” and “dedicated” – it was the “good-looking” that stuck in feminists’ throats.

I feel for modern men, just as I felt for the man on the Tube that day. They’re supposed to remain blind to the legions of women strutting through life and the workplace in thigh-highs and low-cut tops. And, of course, it’s our prerogative to do that. But in this digital age, the days of un-self-aware beauties (the most arresting kind of all) are sadly behind us. If you’re lucky enough to have that extra asset (which is all beauty is), use it cautiously – not as a weapon with which to beat the opposite sex. Better still, ignore it.

If Fernee is so disabled by her looks, she’ll be relieved to discover that nothing makes a woman ugly quite so fast as talking about her own beauty.